Wednesday, 14 August 2013

Met.Anthony of Sourozh-ON THE MOTHER OF GOD

I
want tonight to speak of the Blessed Virgin, of the Mother of God, in her
relation to us; to try to look at what we can learn from her, what she is
as an image - almost an ideal image - of what we should be. I want first
of all to make a point concerning the Orthodox way of calling her the
Mother of God. By this we mean simply that she is the one who brought God
Incarnate into the world. Of course, she is not the mother of the Word of
God according to his divinity, but without her the Word would not have
been made flesh, the Son of God would not have become the Son of Man. An
English writer, Charles Williams, describes the event in a most wonderful
way, as it seems to me, indicating at the same time the reality of the
event and the decisive role of the Mother of God. He says that when the
time was right, a maiden of Israel proved capable of pronouncing the name
of God with all her mind and all her will and all her flesh, and the Word
became flesh. It is a gift of self, and it is at the same time an
unreserved and heroic acceptance: a gift of self in humility, and an
heroic acceptance because of what it could have been, what is meant
humanly speaking. Some of you may remember that the word 'humility' comes
from the Latin humus, the fertile ground. Humility is not a condition
which we try to ape by saying that we are unworthy, that we are not as
good as others imagine us to be - if they do. Humility is a condition of
the earth, lying completely open and surrendered: the earth which is open
to all actions, of mankind, of the rain, accepting the refuse and
accepting the furrow and bringing fruit, surrendered, offered and given.
This is the essence of humility and this is the kind of humility which we
see in the Mother of God. And this is something which we could learn and
which is so difficult to learn, because we are so continuously and so
painfully afraid of offering ourselves, of surrendering, of giving
ourselves to God or even to those who love us and whom we love.
Surrendering gifts is frightening, because it implies also a sort of
frailty. To refuse oneself, to resist, gives us a sense of strength and
vigour; and yet it is not our strength that can achieve great things. You
probably remember how Paul the apostle asked God to give him strength to
fulfil his mission, and how the Lord said, 'My strength is made manifest
in weakness. My grace sufficeth unto thee'. And the weakness of which the
Lord speaks, of course, is neither laziness nor sloth nor timidity. It's
another weakness, it's that of surrender. If I had to convey it in images
I would speak of the way in which a child is taught to write. A pencil is
put into his hand, the mother takes the hand in hers, and then begins to
move it; and as long as the child does not know, and cannot foresee, what
is expected of him, the lines are so perfect, the straights are straight,
the curves are curved. The moment the child begins to imagine he
understands what is expected of him, becomes helpful, pushes, pulls, and
turns, it becomes a scribble. Isn't that exactly what happens to us when
instead of listening deeply, silently, listening intently in the stillness
of our heart and ready to wait on God, we make haste to understand what he
wants, and try to do it before we have understood? The same is true (in
terms of analogies) of the way in which a surgical glove, so frail that
the nail can pierce it, tear it, put on an experienced, skilled hand can
work miracles. Replace its frailty by the strength of an armour's gauntlet
and nothing will be possible. And the same will apply to the image of a
sail on a sailing ship. The sail is the frailest part of it and yet,
directed in the right way, it can engulf the wind and carry the heavy,
strong, resisting structure to its haven. This is the kind of weakness, of
frailty, of surrender, that we can see in the generous gift of the Mother
of God to her Lord. She is the one who is the response of the whole
creation to the maker. God offering himself and the creation in her
person, accepting him, receiving him, worshipping and lovingly, freely and
daringly. When the Mother of God came to Elizabeth her cousin, Elizabeth
exclaimed: 'Blessed is she who has believed. It will be done to her
according to the promise of God'. She is the one who above and beyond all
creatures has believed - believed in the sense of trusting the Lord,
unreservedly and unconditionally. We do not often think of what the words
of the archangel at the Annunciation spelt. The archangel told the Virgin
that she will bear a child, and we wonder, we marvel, at the name of this
child Jesus who is our saviour; but at that moment the promise was also a
threat. According to the law of the Old Testament an unmarried girl who
bore a child was condemned to stoning. She did not say, 'But this cannot
be, it will cost me my life'. She did not either say 'it cannot be'
because she believed that every word of God can be fulfilled, every
promise of his. She said, 'Here am I, the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto
me according to his will'. And his will was, humanly speaking, her death,
unless a miracle occurred. We must learn something from this, because so
often we are afraid of a promise or a prompting from God. What is the cost
which we shall have to pay? What is the risk entailed in obeying and
following the commandment of God or the call? And in that the virgin of
Israel proved a worthy daughter of Abraham, the one who is Isaac. The Lord
had promised to Abraham that he would have a son, that this son would be
the beginning of a race as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sand of
the beaches. Then suddenly, when the son was already a little boy, fully
alive, loved, growing, opening up to the future, the Lord commanded
Abraham to bring him as a blood offering, and at that moment Abraham
believed God more than he believed his promise. He trusted God to know
what he was doing in the certainty that God's word was truth. The Virgin
was in the same position. She trusted God because his word was truth, and
we must learn if we want to belong to that new creation of which she was
the first, if we want to be of the race of the Mother of God, if we want
to be God's own people through whom God is present in the world, we must
learn to trust, to believe, to be as faithful as she promised to be. Then
we can see another moment of her life. In St John's gospel there is the
story of Cana of Galilee, a wedding feast in a village, people gathered
who had brought to the feast all they possessed, all they could give; and
long before their hearts were satiated with joy and with peace, long
before they could say, 'We have had enough and we can go home, carrying
with us a heart fulfilled', the feast was coming to an end. The family was
poor, the wine was coming to its end. And then the Mother of God turned to
the Lord and said they had no wine. A simple remark; and Christ turned to
her with a question, on which we do not dwell because we are piously
accustomed to accept whatever we read in the gospel unthinkingly, or
dismiss it also unthinkingly. Christ turned to her and said, 'What have we
got in common, you and me?' The question I think means, 'Are you turning
to me because you are my mother, because you brought me up, because I was
obedient to you in the course of all my childhood, and you expect me now
to do your bidding? Or is there any other reason? If it is this, if our
only link, the only thing we have in common, is your motherhood, according
to the flesh, mine hour has not yet come. We are still in the realm of
natural events'. The Mother of God does not argue. She does not say
anything to him. She turns to the servants and says: 'Whatever he may say
to you, do it'. Whatever he may say. And then Christ, seemingly
contradicting his own words that his hour had not come, works the glorious
miracle of Cana, transforming the waters of ablution into the good wine of
the kingdom. What happened? What happened between the question and the
words of the Mother of God? Just one thing. Instead of arguing she made an
act of perfect faith, and by this act of faith in her divine son she
established the Kingdom of God. She established Christ in this wedding
feast as the king of heaven, as the Lord, and because through her the
Kingdom had come, what was impossible in terms of the natural world
occurred eschatologically: that is, the future and eternity poured into
time, and within this eternity what cannot be contained by time happened.
Here is another thing which we can learn from her. It is not enough for us
to believe more or less, we must establish for others that situation which
is the Kingdom of God and in which things may happen to them and for them.
There is an old saying that God can enter into any realm provided a human
being opens the door. We are that kind of doorkeeper. Doorkeepers usually
keep doors shut: our vocation is to keep a door open for God who knocks at
every door to find a door open. In moments of strife or moments of
tension, when we have no words and do not know what to do, we can sit
still, turn to the Lord and say, 'Lord, I believe. Come, and give us thy
peace'; and continue praying in the midst of the storm, in the midst of
the strife, in the midst of the terror. Pray that the Lord, who is the
Lord of the storm, as he is the Lord of peace, may come and spread his
peace as he did on the lake of Tiberias when he commanded the waves to be
still and the wind to be silent. This is our vocation. Our vocation is to
be sent like light into the darkness, with our divine hope where there is
no hope; like salt where there is corruption. Our place as Christians is
not in the safety of our Christian communities, but in the storm that must
be stilled; at the heart of corruption that must be stopped; at the point
of hopelessness where we must bring a hope which is beyond all human hope.
Light that shines in the darkness, that is our vocation, and the image
that we find in Cana of Galilee, so quiet and peaceful, opens up on all
the tragedies of the world, all the events, great or small, that begin in
a family and end in international conflict. And then, lastly, two events
which I would like to bring together. The presentation of Jesus in the
Temple and the Crucifixion. Every male child first-born of a woman was to
be brought to the Temple as an offering. If we read back into the Old
Testament about the institution of the act we discover that God commanded
the Hebrews to bring the first-born male children of every family to the
temple as a blood offering, as a ransom for the first-born of Egypt, who
had to die that the Jews might go free. Every first-born male child was
therefore brought and God had the right of death and of life upon him.
Century after century God accepted a vicarious offering, turtle doves and
sheep, and once only in the whole of history he accepted a human offering:
his only begotten Son became man who had to die on the Cross to redeem
mankind - so that the two events are really connected with one another.
But the mother who brought this child knew that God had all power over him
of life and death, and unhesitatingly, in humility and faithfulness,
brought this child. Later, when we see Calvary as described in the Gospel,
we do not see a mother fainting or a mother protesting or a mother
clamouring for mercy, as so many pictures have it. At the foot of the
Cross we see the Mother of God wrapt in deep, tragic silence seeing the
fulfillment of what had been begun when she brought her child to the
Temple. She stood silent, at one with the divine and human will of her
son: she was fulfilling the offering which she had begun thirty-three or
so years before. At one with the will of God, at one with the will of her
divine son, renouncing her own will, her own hopes, in an act of offering.
This is something that very few of us will ever have to face in life, or
at least I hope so; but it happens all the time in various parts of the
world, and it has happened throughout history when one person has allowed
another to give his or her life for a cause, for God or for men. Without a
word of protest, sharing in the heroic offering. I would like to leave
these images with you, however incomplete and imperfect they are. Look at
them and ask yourselves. Where do I stand? What would I do, placed in the
same circumstances? The Mother of God was the response of all creation to
God's love, but God's love is sacrificial love. At the heart of the love
of God there is the gift of self, the Cross. May God grant us to learn
from this frail maiden her heroic simplicity and her wonderful wholeness.
And let us learn from all the steps of her life, all the self-denial and
the gift of self, all the beauty of her surpassing humility and its
perfect obedience to the law of eternal life. Amen.